Slouchy Hat (crochet) and Marble Nail Art

One of the hat designs I've seen a lot lately for crocheting are these slouchy hats. They are really roomy and comfortable, so even people with long hair could wear them and keep their hair inside the hat if they chose.

Front view ^^^ Most hats I make start at the top, but for this one you make the band first and work your length from there. I used a variegated mixed-fiber yarn. The pattern is from the Caron yarn company website as a freebie under the title "Urban Jungle". You can go to www.caron.com to look it up if you'd like to try it also.

One difference I made from the pattern was the style of "popcorn" stitch. Their version has you do 9 SC into the spaces for each popcorn and I didn't like how difficult that made it for me to manipulate the hook and work the yarn. So I did mine as DCs instead and only used 5 per. So if you go try their pattern and do it as written, it will probably have a slightly different look, but the same basic idea. :)


Again with the huge photo of nails!!!?? I don't know why it does that. As you can see, I still needed to do a little more "cleaning" up around the edges from where polish got on the skin. But you can see the idea of what I was going for! This is called Water-Marble nail art and happens to be the first time I tried it. Definitely not perfect, but not bad for a first shot. If you'd like to see how it is done, head on over to youtube.com and look up "water marble nail art"...you will see many choices and end results that are very pretty and varied! :)

Sparkly Nail Polish Rings and more Nail Art!

I absolutely love crafts that are easy to do and are inexpensive to try. These 3 rings are all made with cabachons (or flat-backed clear marbles) that I bought in the floral department of the craft store. You simply paint the flat side with a sparkly nail polish of your choice and let it dry. Then glue it to either a ring finding (far right photo) or you can do like I did and crochet a little setting and band with size 10 cotton crochet thread. For those two on the left, I used a dab of hot glue in the inside to push the bottom of the rock onto so it would be sure to stay, even though I did the setting portion pretty tight so it wasn't likely to fall out even without the glue.

If anyone is interested in knowing how I crocheted up the setting and band, please leave a comment.



For this design of 5 different Halloween monsters, I was inspired by a Youtube user by the name of "IHaveACupcake". She makes very clear videos and always manages to make them look easy. ;)



And last but not least...candy corn inspired stripes!! This was my own idea, though I'm sure other people have probably done it. I don't know why the photo is so darn big compared to the others either..??? Oh well :)

Here's how I did them:
*base polish on bare nail first.
*paint whole nail an opaque white color (I used "snow me white" by SinfulColors)
*paint the nail tips a yellow of your choice (I used "the wonder yellows" by WetNWild)
*paint a stripe in the middle with an orange of your choice (I used "9.0.2.1.Orange" by WetNWild)
*finish up by letting the paint dry a couple minutes, then cover with a fast-drying top coat

That's it! :) These WetNWild colors are new, and they all seem to have t.v. show themed names... The orange is great- has a golden sparkle in it and the yellow is more of a pearly color. I recommend them. :)

Nail Art - Aliens, Frankenstein, Cherries and Angry Bird!

Good weekend to everyone!! Today's post is a quick one...I do have a lot of other stuff in the works right now, but not very much "extra" time for getting it photographed and such today. So I thought I'd share some nail art instead. :) From top to bottom we have Aliens, Cherries, Angry Bird, and Frankenstein.

Most of my inspiration actually comes from some wonderful nail artists on youtube. There are a TON of how-to videos and ideas so I just pick and choose which ones I think may actually be doable for me. I'm not much of an artist when it comes to drawing, so this is good practice. :)

Some of them use acrylic paint to draw on the designs over a base of nail polish... and some just use all nail polish in various colors, which is what I typically do also. There are a bunch of great ideas for Halloween if you're looking for a fun design, go check out youtube "nail art Halloween". :)